Sunday, September 20, 1998 Last modified at 1:34 a.m. on Sunday, September 20, 1998

Texas Tech professors Randy Allen, David Nes, and Henry Nguyen explain the work university scientists are doing to unlock the genetic code of plants.Lance Moler/Staff PhotographerTech researchers try to decode plant DNA

By KARA ALTENBAUMER

Avalanche-Journal

If this century is one for creating knowledge, the next one will be for applying it, says one Texas Tech scientist.

"If you characterize this century as the information age, the next century will be the age of biology and genetics," said Henry Nguyen, a plant genetics professor. But Nguyen and his fellow researchers have to collect a lot of information - millions of pieces of it - before they can apply it.

Scientists at Tech's new Center for Plant Biochemistry and Genomics are trying to unlock the genetic codes of more than half a dozen plants, from cotton to rice to corn.

The ultimate goal is to produce marketable seeds with improved traits - such as longer cotton fibers or disease-resistant sorghum, said David Ness, a chemistry and biochemistry professor.

"We develop the technology to screen plant genetics that can be used by whatever company wants," Nguyen said.

Developing that technology could take decades. Nguyen said scientists in the United States, Europe and Japan have been working for eight years to determine the nucleotide, or chemical, bases that make up the plant genome and to identify an estimated 30,000 or 40,000 genes that control basic plant growth and development.

They used a weedy plant - as a model - and are only half done. That plant has a relatively small genome with only 145 million nucleotides. Humans, by contrast, have 3 billion nucleotides. Rice has 450 million and cotton more than 2 billion.

Tech scientists hope to build on existing genome knowledge to discover genes in cotton, sorghum, corn and wheat for genetic improvement of these locally important crops, Nguyen said.

Once scientists break down DNA into individual genetic codes, they can isolate traits they want to intensify or lessen. From there, those genes could then be inserted into other plants to give them desirable traits.

This type of knowledge has already been used to create plants that fend off harmful fungi, by genetically engineering them to produce substances that are toxic to the fungi, said Ness.

"The key is that there are things we can do with conventional breeding, but there are limits," said Randy Allen, a biology and plant and soil science professor. "You can't get things from other species. You could imagine being able to custom design plants."

While genetic engineering in plants can already be done in some instances like BT (bacterial toxin) cotton or roundup-resistance cotton, scientists have still got a long way to go before large-scale results.

"We simply require more knowledge before we can start engineering or designing," Nguyen said. "We have to understand what gene might give rice boll weevil resistance before we can engineer it."

While some may question the value of studying rice in West Texas, Nguyen said rice is easier to sequence than some other crops and that the knowledge gained from it could be applied to corn or sorghum.

"We're not the USDA or Texas Agricultural Experiment Station - we're a university," said Allen. "We have to take a more global view. Rice is the most important crop in the world."

In fact, building these national and international networks with things like rice research will help push Tech toward its goal of being a top research institution, Nguyen said.

The project also teaches people that agriculture and plant science isn't low-tech, Allen said.

"People in big cities don't realize where their food comes from," he said. "They don't realize that modern agricultural research is technologically equal to modern medical research. If you go into a cancer lab, they're doing the same thing."